22. Play, Remiel
22
PLAY, REMIEL
REMIEL
When I finally dress in Kyd’s too-bright clothing, I stand at the door of my hospital room and peer into the hall. It’s dark, not a populated area of the asylum, and to be honest, it creeps me out. It’s movie-stereotypical. It reminds me of the asylum season of American Horror Story . If I had to guess, the weather outside would be stormy and ominous. Tumultuous, like my heartbeat.
I like horror shows, books, and movies, and I grew up in Moros, so it’s not like my life doesn’t resemble one, but it’s never felt more real than right now. Not even the night I ran during initiation or hunted a cult through Vile House.
I step into the hallway and peer into the darkness. I swear something is looking back at me. Squinting, I try to make out the shapes and the sounds, as if squinting helps my hearing, too. The light above me flickers fluorescent, but ten feet down, the shadows eat the shapes.
I blink, unfocusing my eyes. I see it. Something silver and pulsing. Thrashing. Monsters trying to rattle their chains and break free from their confinement. He’s here. He came. Because…
Not even death, Remiel.
Not even death can take me from him.
The calling card is in my pocket because I’m sentimental about it. It might not be verbal proof that I’m important to him, but the sentiment is implied within his four words.
“Do you hate me?” I ask the hallway, my voice timid.
“Worse.”
I swallow, fiddling with the card in my pocket. As much as I wanted to see him over the past few days, a part of me thought it would be tender. That he’d look at me with something deeper than ownership in his eyes. That he’d want to make sure I’m okay.
But now that I’m facing him, even though I can’t see him, fear is the reaction that feels right. Krypt scares me. I’m comfortable being afraid of him. I crave it, even. He told me that if I fell prey to the family curse, he’d end my bloodline. Technically, I died for three minutes, so I broke my bargain with him. I worried him. I scared him. I chased him away by wanting him. I got soft with him when he doesn’t respond to soft.
And I have no idea how he’s going to react to any of it. He’s had three days to process it, but Director implied he stayed away for my own good. My own good mustn’t be the priority anymore.
“What’s worse than hate?” I ask, sweating.
“Indifference,” he says.
Oh . My face falls and my heart sinks. He’s right. At least hatred is a strong emotion. Indifference means nothing, and if he feels nothing for me… my breath comes out shaky, and I stare at the refraction of the flickering light on the laminated tiles. They’re chipped, the stone floor peeking through every crack.
“Why didn’t you just let me die then? Is that really how you feel?” I ask the floor.
“No,” he says, the word so finite it jars me and makes my stomach flutter. “Whose hero were you trying to be, Remiel?”
I’m the farthest thing from a hero. I can’t even call myself a martyr, because if I’d died, Soren would be next, and the Sauder curse would live on to wipe out every male in my family.
“I’m no hero.”
“Finally, you listen to me,” he says, and I can’t see him, but I feel him take a step closer to me—many steps. I guess my sixth sense didn’t die during those three minutes. “How fucking dare you, Remiel.”
I startle when his voice comes from behind me, his breath on my neck. I shriek so loud it echoes down the hall, but before I can turn around, his arm wraps around my neck from behind and his palm presses to my throat. When his fingers wrap around the sides, I come back to life for real. His threatening touch is still a touch, and I’ve missed his hands on me.
“I told you that you were mine.” His voice is more abrasive than normal, shaky and uneven. “I told you not even death could take you from me. I fucking told you what would happen if you gave in to the family curse.”
I shake against him, my back to his chest. My body is weak from spending days in bed, but my mind comes back online like he’s woken it from the dead. With the permission of his nearness and the timbre of his voice, my brain wires all cross and spark back to life.
“Why’d you do it?” he asks, tightening his hand on my throat. “Are you seriously that fucking pathetic? That you need my attention so badly that you’ll kill yourself if you don’t get it?”
Anger flares to life and joins my fear. “Fuck you.”
“No. Fuck you , Remiel.” He chokes me. My hands latch onto his wrists, but my prying does nothing. Krypt’s lips land on the side of my neck, tasting me hesitantly. “Am I important to you?” he asks in my voice. “Am I important to you? Am I important to you?”
“Krypt,” I choke.
“Guess we’ll find out who’s stronger. Me or you, Remiel.” He presses a soft kiss to the side of my neck, and then he shoves me so hard my face smacks off the wall on the opposite side of the hallway.
Blood fills my mouth and nose, dripping over my lips. My ears ring and my head spins, eyes not yet sure if they can focus. I grab at my face, turning to find him, but what I find isn’t Krypt. It’s only the sickness within him.
His monsters have finally snapped free from their chains.
This. This is what it means for him to crack.
“Good luck,” he says in a voice so wicked my bones rattle. Then he laughs, and fear like I have never known skitters through me with such ardour that I know I don’t stand a chance of surviving him.
I have better odds of surviving the asylum.
So, I run. I run, and this time, I don’t fucking look back.
I don’t know these hallways and can’t navigate their maze in the dark. Fear makes me fast, but terror clouds my judgement, that cognitive distortion is back to make me stupid. I’m sick of running from him. I’m sick of being hunted by him. I want to stop, face him, lift my chin and own up to what my body wants from him.
But I’m not suicidal anymore, and I know I won’t survive the monsters that have broken free from the confinement he so carefully kept them in.
My Crocs are worn and slippery, barely any traction left, and the outfit Kyd brought me puts me at a complete disadvantage. I’m bright yellow and hot pink, and not even the dim hallways conceal me. So I stop aiming for the light. I run down darkened corridors, ignoring the eyes I feel peering at me from the windows in the doors. I don’t know what back alley part of the asylum we’re in, but I know I won’t like what I find behind those doors.
Krypt’s monsters aren’t the only ones surrounding me.
“Prettttyyyyyyy.”
I shriek and sprint past the voice, grabbing the wall to vault around a corner. I come face to face with a woman in a hospital gown. Her stringy hair conceals her face, but her milky eyes glow at me, and her toothless smile rivals Kyd’s.
“Friend,” she says.
I almost piss myself again. I keep running, my legs already tiring and my lungs protesting every breath. At my back, Krypt stalks with casual grace. A horse still abiding by the reins but champing at the bit to break free from the lead line. The woman behind me hisses, shrieking in fear, which means Krypt is closer than I think.
A green glow lights the passage ahead. I turn in the opposite direction, avoiding the light in order to find somewhere to hide. I’ll never make it out of here, and I can’t outrun him, but maybe I can hide. Maybe I can crawl into myself, hold my breath, and wait him out. He’ll get bored eventually.
Right?
I find an arched entrance and slow my pace as I walk through it. The stone walls have changed, becoming older and more damaged. Along the walls, metal rings are bolted into the stone, chains and manacles hanging from them. A waiting area? A prisoner area? What the fuck is this place? I reach out to touch a chain, snapping my hand back just as fast. If I rattle them, I’ll rattle Krypt.
The longer I walk, the more chains there are. At least nothing is tethered to them anymore. The manacles are free from necks and wrists, but their history scares me.
The narrow passage ends at a wooden door, iron bars acting as a window. I glance behind me, totally trapped now, stuck in a passageway with no comforting exit. He’s somewhere at my back, but this door doesn’t promise refuge. It’s a trap, and I’ve led myself into it.
The sensation of spider legs skitters over my goosebumped skin. The stone surrounding me chills the damp air, but the darkness beyond the door is colder. A chilled sweat sticks my shirt to my lower back, and no matter how many times I swallow, the lump in my throat never goes down. I wrap my fingers around the bars, hesitantly leaning forward to peer through the slats in the door.
Absolute blackness.
I look over my shoulder towards the corridor.
Absolute darkness. I’m trapped in a living nightmare.
The only light comes from me. Because the fucking shirt I’m wearing has a glow-in-the-dark unicorn on it, and I built its charge by standing under the fluorescent lights for so long. I try to rip the hoodie off to turn it inside out, but as soon as I pull my arm through the sleeve, I go still. Footsteps. Coming closer. Coming from everywhere. At my back and beyond the door.
Oh, fuck. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
A terrified whimper makes the lump in my throat worse, and I can’t fucking breathe! Panic chokes me, and I don’t know where to run. I’m trapped among manacles, a dark hall, and a door that promises something worse. And I’m glowing, drawing it all to me.
“Krypt!” I scream, losing my mind. “Please!”
Please, what? Please help me? Please save me from whatever else is stalking me? Please end me now because I can’t stand the thought of walking through that door?
I scorn myself for screaming, drawing attention to my position, but I can’t help it. Fear has me irrational, and no matter how hard I try to steady my breathing and calm myself down, sobs of terror escape from between my lips. I cover my mouth with my hand, pressing my back to the door. I slide down it, trying not to cry, trying to get my bearings, trying to fucking think of a way out of this.
Because fear is the feeling that felt right when Krypt was my focal point, but now that I don’t know where he is, I don’t like it. I don’t want it. I can’t handle it.
I’m a prisoner to it because I put myself in a position to be afraid of everything when all I want is to be afraid of him . Only him.
I pull my knees to my chest and bury my face in my hands, completely giving up. I’m ashamed of how pathetic I am. Trapped in a madhouse with insane patients and a demon haunting me, I lose myself to fright so hard that I can’t even rationalize the dread eating at my nerves. It’s all-consuming, making me shake and shiver, bawling into my hands because this is it. This is the madness. The true madness. The one that every male in my family surrenders to.
Back in my hospital room, I recognized that taking the pill was wrong. I felt a spark of hope when Krypt sent the calling card to tell me that not even death will take me from him. Where’d that hope go? I’m right back to spiralling because…
I took a suicide pill and survived, but I won’t survive this.
I’m about to succumb to the Sauder curse.
I belong here, in this dark, abandoned ward of the asylum. This is exactly where I’m meant to be, but I’m fresh meat and haven’t yet learned how to live among the others. I’m crippled by the panic of it. Of them.
I cry so hard my head pounds and my body uncontrollably heaves. Those regrets are racing through my mind again, clouded by terror and stomped on by failure. I didn’t want to become another statistic, but here I am, lost in an asylum, losing fragments of myself and no longer fighting to live. I don’t know what’s going to kill me first, the monsters hunting me or the promise of reprieve if I take my life into my own hands. I’ve given up. Again. For real this time.
Looking up, I find a long length of chain hanging from the wall next to me. I could loop it through the iron bars in the door, wrap it around my neck, choke myself to near death and then let it take me wholly. Maybe I’d get to listen to the rattle of my lungs and be fascinated by it like I was with Ophelia. Maybe my calves will twitch and my eyes will bulge, and when Krypt finds me, he’ll stand there and count down my final six minutes.
My life isn’t mine anymore, anyway. I have nothing to live for, and I’ll never be important to anyone. Krypt might possess me, but he doesn’t actually care about me, so what’s the fucking point? My brother has Vile House, and my sister… she has my brother. They’ll be better off without me, and so will this world.
It’s time. Time to go.
Crying harder as realization dawns that this is my finite ending, I reach for the chain. There’s no game of chance this time, not like with the pill. I know exactly what I’m doing now.
But I don’t get the chance. The door at my back opens, and I scream bloody murder as I’m yanked through. Consumed by darkness. By fear. By fate.
Time passes and I’m aware, but I’m so lost in my own internal safe place that I don’t feel what’s happening to me. I’ve retreated, trusting my mind more than my reality, and that’s the most horrific thing. Because my mind isn’t sane and it promises me no safety.
My eyes are open, my head tipped back on the hard back of a wooden chair. In the cathedral-like ceiling of yet another chamber, the moonlight filters through a grate, letting in the cold autumn air along with it. I see it. I don’t know what it means. I don’t feel it.
Until I’m jolted back to life by a shock so intense my jaw clenches and my muscles spasm. Electric currents turn me rigid and jumpy, and the pain of it is so strong I hiss through my locked jaw.
“Play.”
My body sags when the current turns off. My jaw unlocks and the taste of blood fills my mouth. My thick and numb tongue is bleeding, but I don’t have the energy to swallow the blood. It drips down my chin along with my drool, and I struggle just to breathe.
“Play, Remiel.”
I cough, barely able to lift my head. I sag in the chair, but when my legs twitch, something is between them. Closing one eye to look, I find a cello there, propped against me to keep it upright. It’s not just any cello, it’s mine. The one I keep on display in my shop and only play when I’m melancholy and afraid.
Groaning, I force myself to sit straighter, still scared but less so because I know Krypt is the one demanding my music. I look around the dark chamber, noticing I’m the only thing spotlighted by the moon. The corners are dark, and Krypt lurks within one.
My fingers twitch around the length of a bow, and despite how infrequently I play anymore, it’s second nature. The instrument between my legs is comforting because I’ve spent so much of my life playing it, using it to speak instead of saying words, letting it convey everything inside me, bringing it to the outside.
Moments ago, or maybe hours, I almost killed myself again. Now, I’ll play. Because it’s the only thing I know how to do.
I sit straighter, gaining movement and energy as the buzz of the shock wears off. My crotch is wet, but I barely pay it any mind, too far gone to worry about dignity. I don’t know what to say or how to speak to Krypt, so I’ll let my music do the talking.
I clear my throat, grip the bow, and hold it to the strings. My left hand comes to the fingerboard, positioning the cello how I like it. Familiar. Comfortable. Safe. I don’t know what he wants me to play or why he even wants me to play at all, but my fingers naturally find the strings they want to start on, and my bow brings them to life.
I play.
Through the sound of my music, I tell Krypt how sorry I am. I let him feel my sorrow and despair. I bring to life the depth of my darkness and the absolution of my doom. I show him how helpless and afraid I am, and how cynical I feel towards everyone, but mostly myself. I cry when my fear comes through the notes, blending into the harmony that signifies my pain. Because pain is at the very root of everything.
It fucking hurts. It hurts to be a nobody. It hurts to own a music shop that feeds a town’s needs, but to have none of my own needs met by the town. It hurts to be a Sauder. It hurts to have lost, to have feared love, to have lived half a life on the outskirts of sensation. It hurts to know I’ve wasted my limited time here, never getting close to anyone or experiencing anything great. It hurts to amount to nothing. And it hurts to know that when I’m gone, the accumulation of everything I was will narrow down to the words ‘friend, brother, son’ on yet another headstone in a long line of them.
I play harder.
I express sorrow and shame. Malice and anger. Terror and foreboding. I play it all for Krypt because he’s the only person listening. I play for so long that my fingertips bleed and my shoulder burns from moving the bow. My tears have turned dry and my heartbeat has settled into something as melancholic as my mood. The lump in my throat eases, making my voice want to join my music. But I don’t let it. I don’t trust the lyrics.
When the emotions are purged from my soul, my bow falls away to hang at my side, the tip resting on the stone floor. The shaft of moonlight has moved, highlighting me from a new direction and marking time passed. My fingers slide down the fingerboard, shrieking soft notes before blanketing me in silence. Because there’s nothing left to say.
I sit and breathe. Just breathe. Not seeing. Not feeling. Not rationalizing. But living. Alive. For now.